Some highlights from Michael H. Kelly's Dec. '09 ClimateGate writeup

The CRU Mails

[December 9th 2009; Michael H. Kelly] But already the fatal flaw is evident. One of the more cautious scientists, one who has actually fought with the IPCC to keep caveats as to the uncertainty of models within their reports, one who does not underestimate natural variability, has set up a group to examine patterns of forcings on the climate. He says, 'What we hope is that the current patterns of temperature change prove distinctive, quite different from the patterns of natural variability in the past.'

I think they are not supposed to 'hope' things in that way. There is a human tendency to magnify the evidence that proves the things we hope to find and diminish that which does not, and scientists of all people are supposed to guard rigorously against this. They are a forensic team looking to bring a murder home to a pre-determined suspect. Without even being sure there is a body.

The journalist says: 'For climatologists, the search for an irrefutable "sign" of anthropogenic warming has assumed an almost Biblical intensity.' I don't think I need point out how that sentence should have sounded alarm bells.
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Now it's June 1997 and one of the CRU scientists, Mike Hulme, who will go on to espouse the theory of 'post-normal science', is putting his name to a letter to The Times, drafted on his behalf by Greenpeace, 'to remind your readers of the seriousness of the potential threat caused by our continued use of fossil fuels ... There is no doubt the need for precautionary, preventative action is urgent.' [0872202064]
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I had a big laugh-out-loud at another mail to Hulme shortly after that. One Joseph Alcamo weighs in on a pre-Kyoto Statement (his capital) they are trying to put together:

'I am very strongly in favor of as wide and rapid a distribution as possible for endorsements. I think the only thing that counts is numbers. The media is going to say "1000 scientists signed" or "1500 signed". No one is going to check if it is 600 with PhDs versus 2000 without. They will mention the prominent ones, but that is a different story. Conclusion -- Forget the screening, forget asking them about their last publication (most will ignore you.) Get those names!'
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Those beyond the circle of Anthropogenic Global Warming believers who doubt the miraculous Sign must be cast into the outer darkness. The policy the gang have evolved is to insist all skeptics must point out problems with their work in peer-reviewed journals or not be taken seriously. They then do their utmost to deny them access to these journals by means of unfavourable peer reviews; when this fails, they will start to boycott these journals and lobby for the editors to be removed, and deny that they are peer-reviewed literature at all.
...McIntyre is our hero. In the film he will be played by ... Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart are dead and no-one nowadays specializes in quiet but dogged decency. Perhaps he must remain an unseen presence off camera, like film portrayals of Mohammed. Do it as a sort of remake of 'Phone Booth': Phil Jones cornered in his office, slowly crumbling from regent to wreck, Kiefer Sutherland reading out McIntyre's mails as a voice-over.
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...I would like to do a paper on the spatial correlation, or complete lack of it, of the CRU climate change team. They are never on the same landmass at the same time.
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The realclimate.org website is launched to correct the terrible imbalance involved in alternative viewpoints occasionally getting reported. 'The site will be moderated to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio.' Which means the comments will be censored to avoid alternative viewpoints being reported there or uncomfortable questions being asked. (1139521913, 'going to be careful about what comments we screen through... We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or no.')
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Next. 1104893567. 'Hi Keith - Happy new year. 'Criticisms of his section of the IPCC draft. 'The biggest problem with what appears here is in the handling of the greater variability found in some reconstructions, and the whole discussion of the 'hockey stick'. The tone is defensive, and worse, it both minimizes and avoids the problems. We should clearly say (e.g., page 12 middle paragraph) that there are substantial uncertainties ... Attempting to avoid such statements will just cause more problems. ... M&M claim that when they used [Mann's statistical procedure] with a red noise spectrum, it always resulted in a 'hockey stick'. Is this true? If so, it constitutes a devastating criticism of the approach.' It was true.
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1106322460 is fun. Michael Mann frets that they are losing the AGU journal GRL to the Contrarians. Rogue research has been allowed to see the light of day. In particular, they have agreed to publish McIntyre's debunking of Mann's claims. So Mann suggests keeping dossiers on (I assume) the editors:

'It's one thing to lose "Climate Research". We can't afford to lose GRL. I think it would be useful if people begin to record their experiences w/ both Saiers and potentially Mackwell (I don't know him--he would seem to be complicit w/what is going on here).
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Tom Wigley: 'If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.'
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Next, Phil Jones goes to Madrid, Pune, Chicago. His interlocutor Kevin Trenberth one-ups him with Beijing, Hawaii, New Zealand. I am finding this kind of thing amusing again.
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Then, 1108399027, February 2005, something I do get and it's hilarious. The Wall Street Journal is on Mann's case: 'Statistician Francis Zwiers of Environment Canada, a government agency, says he now agrees that Dr. Mann's statistical method "preferentially produces hockey sticks when there are none in the data." Dr. Mann, while agreeing that his mathematical method tends to find hockey-stick shapes, says this doesn't mean its results in this case are wrong.'

To clarify: he used a program that was designed to produce hockey-stick shapes from almost any data. He was found out, in the McIntyre paper he has been desperately and unsuccessfully trying to rubbish. His defence now? Yes, I did do that, but the data might, coincidentally, have produced a hockey-stick shape if I hadn't rigged it to do so.
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Next. 1107899057. Something I don't get. A mail appearing to date from two days after the above WSJ article, but in it Mann tells Andy Revkin [see below] of the New York Times 'The McIntyre and McKitrick paper is pure scientific fraud.'
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Phil had 'tried to convince the reporter here there wasn't a story,' [the hockey-stick being horse-shit] 'but he went with it anyway.' Something he regrets not having had the opportunity to have said to the reporter: 'What is the point of doing any more paleo work, if we are constrained by the answer we are allowed to get.' Quite right. If you're not allowed to twist the data into any shape you choose, simply don't play any more.
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Ben Santer has a paper rejected, sniffs, 'I doubt whether I'll be submitting any papers to Nature in the next few years.' Diddums.
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1120014836
Overpeck tells his IPCC author/editor/reviewers not to let on that it's actually their own research that they are quoting approvingly in the report.

please not [note, sic, all these things are sics] that in the US, the US Congress is questioning whether it is ethical for IPCC authors to be using the IPCC to champion their own work/opinions. Obviously, this is wrong and scary, but if our goal is to get policy makers (liberal and conservative alike) to take our chapter seriously, it will only hurt our effort if we cite too many of our own papers (perception is often reality). PLEASE do not cite anything that is not absolutely needed, and please do not cite your papers unless they are absolutely needed.
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1120593115
'The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn't statistically significant.'

'The Australian also alerted me to this blogging ! I think this is the term ! Luckily I don't live in Australia.'

Not sure who comes out with these golden quotes, all kinds of inline mails.

But this one is Phil Jones: 'As you know, I'm not political. If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences.'
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Next P. Jones is up:

'Mike's response could do with a little work, but as you say he's got the tone almost dead on. I hope I don't get a call from congress ! I'm hoping that no-one there realizes I have a US DoE grant and have had this (with Tom W.) for the last 25 years.'
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The next, 1121869083, 19 Jul 2005, smells of shenanigans or sleight-of-hand too, Briffa taking pains to avoid being dragged into them, or blamed for them. Argy-bargy about MWP.

Enough. Time for another fast-forward.

February 2006. Mails in range 1140568004 to 1142108839. Gene Wahl signs his mails, 'Peace, Gene'. The IPCC crew are fudging rules so that his and Caspar Amman's paper which apparently supports Mann's hockey stick can be cited in IPCC AR4, even though it will not have been published by the deadline. ('Try and change the Received date!' Phil Jones will later say in 1189722851. 'Don't give those skeptics something to amuse themselves with'.)
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Rosanne D'arrigo causes them worries with a paper pointing out the 'divergence problems' with tree-ring samples. 'It looked to me like she had pretty well killed the hockey stick.' Ye of little faith! The hockey stick cannot be killed by mortal man.

1141930111, Phil Jones: 'I'm the greatest hoarder of climate information!' He has developed suspicions of Susan, one of their superiors on the IPCC report I think. 'I knew she had an agenda, but I hadn't fully realised how extensive it was.'

A bigger fast-forward. June 2007 now.

1182361058. Steve McIntyre has discovered that quality control claims regarding a paper Phil Jones published dismissing the Urban Heat Island effect on temperature-measuring stations are incorrect: data was unavailable for 205 of the 260 stations cited, and some of the others have moved. He invites Phil to issue a correction. Instead Phil seeks legal advice. 'I do now wish I'd never sent them the data after their FOIA request!' Aww, somebody blabbed about Britain's Freedom of Information Act. (I'm sorry, but I continue to savour this joke: someone, a scientist, saying, 'Don't tell anyone about the Freedom of Information Act.')

Gene 'Peace' Wahl weighs in: 'I know what you mean about the need for community when under duress. The individual quality of being a scientist works against us in this way.'

Now I stop laughing and get angry: he continues, 'I was wondering if there is any way we as the scientific community can seek some kind of "cease and desist" action with these people.' Suggests Phil at least 'inquire into the possibility of acting proactively in response via the British system' for slander. Peace, Gene.
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1188478901. Mann suggests a libel action against someone else, Keenan, who's calling into question the data behind Phil's surface station paper. Keenan is using the word 'fraud', but then Mann himself often does with far less reason. 'Of course, if it does get published, maybe the resulting settlement would shut down E&E and Benny and Sonja all together! [He refers to Energy and Environment, a hopelessly off-message Contrarian-infested journal, and its editors.] We can only hope, anyway. So maybe in an odd way its actually win-win for us, not them. Lets see how this plays out...'

Next more ramifications of this. Phil invites Wei Chyung Wang, his colleague on the UHI paper to sue Keenan for libel. He declines. Following that, though, Tom Wigley says, 'Seems to me that Keenan has a valid point. The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (WCW at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect.'

Then in 1189515774 Phil suggests Mann sue Keenan over something in a footnote. Mann declines, says Wang must do it 'or at the least threaten a lawsuit ... The threat of a lawsuit alone my prevent them from publishing this paper.'
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1206628118, March 2008, is curious. Jonathan Overpeck has just made a brave and unabashed appearance on a moving daytime talk-show segment called 'I Still Love My Moderate Republican Dad'. No, but he asks the gang for advice on something that's worrying him. He has been outed as the prominent AGW researcher alluded to but not named in skeptic David Deming's Senate testimony who, mistaking Deming for one of the team, famously told him 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period'. His instinct is to deny, but strangely enough he says 'I suspect that this Deeming [sic] guy could then produce a fake email.'
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1223915581, October 2008, is yell-at-the-screen outrageous if you are a British taxpayer. Tim Osborn writes to Keith Briffa that 'I just had an interesting chat with Jack Newnham from the International Development Team at Price Waterhouse Cooper. They get lots of DfID (Douglas: DfID is the UK Government Department for International Development) funding.'Their idea is to fund a centre that would be the first point of call for advice and for commissioning research related to climate change and development or to climate change in countries where DfID operate. He was talking about £15 million per year for 5 years!'

They'll also be sounding out other climate research centres such as Tyndall but CRU could bag this in whole or in part.

In other words, £75 million of British government money that's meant to help the Third World could be going to these lying, propagandizing, deliberately slipshod bastards!

And if it hasn't gone to CRU, it will have gone to someone similar. That's nice. Forget infrastructure, famine, trade and so on, and least the impoverished Africans will be able to know what the weather's going to be like. Or, at least, what people think the weather ought to be like.
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Now we come to what may be my very favourite mail in the whole collection. 1231190304. January 5th 2009. Phil Jones, the great, the inimitable Phil Jones, to contacts at the Met Office, expressing his disappointment, his gloom, his dismay, his depression, that global warming is failing to arrive as predicted; and ticking them off for not keeping their evil subversive Contrarian weathermen in line.
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I am picturing Phil standing outside his house in a T-shirt and shorts in complete denial, arse-deep in snowdrifts, lacerated by an icy wind, icicles hanging off his ears, muttering 'Quite balmy today, really' through chattering teeth. 'Come in and shut the bloody door, it's freezing,' says his wife. 'Put a jumper on for Christ's sake.' 'Nonsense. It's not cold. It's lovely for the time of year. Daffodils'll be out early if it carries on like this. I'm sweltering. What are you, a Contrarian?'
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I don't in these mails find the scientists - unlike the media and lobby groups - pushing the line that man is actually responsible for the cold weather too; nor have I noticed them using 'climate change' rather than 'global warming' all that much. They know quite well the cold weather makes them look like chumps.
...Hilariously, McIntyre has pointed out Mann has inserted a big stretch of data upside down. Hilariously, they will say this doesn't really matter. Hilariously, they are essentially right, which should tell you all you need to know about the models.
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In the next, [1254323180] the gang are still scrambling to deal with the Briffa-Yamal revelations. Mann says they are 'part of the attack of the corporate-funded attack machine'. I think this is not only mendacious and paranoid but downright insensitive to his CRU colleagues, when they are so keen on corporate funding themselves. In 1254345329 they're still trying to limit damage. How many other studies are contaminated by having incorporated the debunked Briffa one? Tim Osborn tries to be upbeat: 'I wouldn't say we were immune to the issue' but on the bright side 'the IPCC AR4 and other assessments are not saying the evidence is 100% conclusive (or even 90% conclusive) but just "likely" that modern is warmer than MWP.'
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When people go wrong they always go macho. Let a gay hairdresser start fiddling the till and he will commence to talk like Al Capone.

Back to 1255095172 though. Butch Ben Santer also says 'The integrity and reliability of this story does NOT rest on a single observational dataset', again returning to the leitmotif of there's no point in attacking any single bit of data, because they have more where that came from, although they all seem to depend on each other, and each individually seems to turn out doubtful when someone is so ill-mannered as to examine them closely. He also says that 'I am sure that, over 20 years ago, Phil could not have foreseen that the raw station data might be the subject of legal proceedings by the CEI and Pat Michaels.' And what other possible reason could there be for preserving it? Certainly not that someone might want to use it to do science with at some point. Weather data in a climate research centre is really just cluttering up the place. He further declares that 'Phil Jones is one of the true gentlemen of our field'. Well, it takes one to know one, I suppose.
...we will only fully understand what happened and the people involved when someone writes a novel about it.)
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At this point we are already guaranteed to be the laughing stock of the future, for having entertained this nonsense for even a single year. A cautionary tale of mass hysteria, comparable to the witch-burners or the millenarian doom-cults, all the more so because we were more technologically advanced and fancied ourselves so superior to them.
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I think only a couple of them are anything close to conscious and deliberate f-words. Only a couple of them are genuinely unpleasant people, and even they would be genuinely surprised if you told them that. 'Seems like we are now the bad guys,' Phil Jones says wonderingly after the 'Kinne character' of Climate Research refuses to bow to all their demands. They genuinely believe their theory is correct and that they are doing right in bending all the rules to serve it. It has been an idee fixee with them since before the mails open; and of course their careers are now built upon it. They are a clique, not a conspiracy.

They should be objects of pity, for the most part. Anyone can be wrong. Their failings are human ones of seeing what you want to see, preferring your friends to strangers, not going out of your way to do the right thing if it will harm your career. But these failings and the behaviour they have indulged in have absolutely no place in science or the determination of public policy.

'Climate science' is rotten, a joke. But the real rot is in the media. All through these mails there are examples of scientists doing the right thing, standing up against groupthink, calling their friends to account, sometimes even among the inner circle. But the honourable ones have had to fight not only the zombie scientists but the journalists who unquestioningly arrayed themselves with them. Save for a few loose-cannon columnists the media by and large have been a bloody embarrassment, acting as unpaid flacks to zealots, hysterics and hucksters.

Where were you? Where are you now? This used to be the stuff that Pulitzers were made of. The thing is, there is much that is shocking and outrageous but so far little that is actually really new in these files. It's just all the things skeptics have been saying for years, but straight from the guilty parties' mouths.
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On the other hand, no-one at all who's coming relatively new to this scandal should take my word for it. Read around, on both sides, and make your own mind up. It requires some effort at times, but there are people who will take the trouble to explain the more technical parts to you, and all you really need is an ability to weigh evidence and a functioning bullshit detector. See which side you think is more honest. See which side you think is more open to debate and good scientific procedure. See which side blusters more. See which side consistently, tirelessly, shamelessly gives itself the benefit of every possible doubt. See which side treats 'There's a lot we don't know' as a feature rather than a drawback.

The only good thing to come out of this may be that for many people it will be a salutary lesson in independent-mindedness. The stuff we get taught about thinking for ourselves rather than trusting to authority to do it for us applies equally to all forms of authority: to the teachers and pop stars who teach you that as well as to politicians and journalists. It applies to scientists too now, and it always and especially applies to people who tell you they only want to save the world.
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Even though his work was as dodgy as anyone's I feel sorry for Briffa at times. He appears to develop a kind of Stockholm Syndrome towards the hectoring Mann. In his heart he is well aware of the flaws in Mann's research and in the early years he is capable of mutiny. 1024334440, 2002. 'I am sick to death of Mann stating his reconstruction represents the tropical area just because it contains a few (poorly temperature representative ) tropical series. He is just as capable of regressing these data again any other "target" series , such as the increasing trend of self-opinionated verbage he has produced over the last few years , and ... (better say no more)'. Cook sympathises: 'Of course, I agree with you. We both know the probable flaws in Mike's recon, particularly as it relates to the tropical stuff. ... It is puzzling to me that a guy as bright as Mike would be so unwilling to evaluate his own work a bit more objectively.'
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I say above 'they genuinely believe' but I really think that subconsciously at least they know it's a crock. Because if the theory was true, the above [constant flying] would be the equivalent of people working for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children writing mails saying, 'Hi, sorry for the delay in reply, I was just punching a baby in the face.'

Of course when restrictions start coming in climate scientists will be one of the elite exempted classes allowed to fly wherever the hell they want whenever the hell they want. Well, they will have to be, because if the buggers were forced to stay home for one single weekend they would instantly crack and announce they'd been kidding all along.
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In the film there should be a scene after the scandal breaks where the Russians go, 'Keith, I thought we were droogs. Why, Keith, you always send us into wilderness, while you are on beach in Zod, to sample trees, and then, you only use twelve trees? Keith, I have collect for you sample of many many trees. It is cold, Keith, where we go to get trees, and when it is not cold are bitey insects. And yet, you only use twelve. Life is unbearable. I am very sad.'
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[re: media] The indifference has been astonishing; the naked bias in the grudging reports there have been, embarrassing. It's as if at the end of a thriller, the hero escapes from pursuit and crawls through barbed wire carrying the vital dossier that will save the world, he's over the border and he's free, and he gets to safety and he hands it in to the authorities to expose the conspiracy and ... they shrug and throw it in the bin.